Talks - Regular Sadhana to Develop the Will

Regular Sadhana to Develop the Will

Regular Sadhana to Develop the Will

Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
, 1999-03-26

Today Gurudeva answers a question about the future, and how we can change the future by changing ourselves. He talks about regular sadhana to develop the will power to dominate the intellect and the instinctive mind. Many visitors came yesterday to Kauai Aadheenam, so this is a "double duty" session to make up for the one missed yesterday. Among our visitors, the global spiritual leadership forum.

Unedited Transcript:

Today at Kauai Aadheenam, March 26th.

March 25, yesterday, we missed out. We had a very large, wonderful group here, of global leaders. Global Spiritual Leadership. A convention being held on the Garden Island of Kauai. They visited our beautiful ashram. We were with them about three to four to five hours. It was a wonderful experience. Their vision for the future is to spiritually uplift all those around them, starting with their immediate family and working out from there.

What does spiritual upliftment mean?

It means that you are driven by your soul. You are not driven by the instinctive mind, you know what that is all about. You are not driven by the intellect, you know what that is all about. You are driven by the soul. Not many people know what that is all about. That is the intuition, the superconscious mind. That is religious principles.

We have just finished a wonderful book called 'Weaver's Wisdom'. A 2,200-year scripture translated into American English, of 1080 verses on how to do almost anything in life. They had the same problems then as we have now. But, they knew how to handle them better than we do now. You are going to love this book when you get it. Weaver's Wisdom. It is the old, ancient, famous 'Tirukural', sworn on in the courts of law in South India. It is that important a scripture. It is almost like another Veda. It will be out soon and we will see that you are notified well in advance, so you can order your copy.

We have a nice question here from a devotee in New Orleans, wondering if Saivism has predictions about the future.

Yes, it does. But all predictions about the future are subjective, because the future can be changed. If people change themselves, they change the future. The future can either be instinctive, as we see on CNN, read in Newsweek. Or, it can be highly intellectual or spiritual. It all depends on how we are functioning inside ourselves, same as a home. A home can be a terrible place, with anger and misunderstanding. It can be a place of high intellectual discussions. Or, it could be a place of worship that you would always want to come back to, like a temple.

We do have choices in our life. The Saivite religion considers those kinds of choices as being very important to alter the future, to bring us into a better future, and even alter what the planets have to say about what we should do, how we should be, how we should live, how we should act.

We do have free will. You do have free will. Everyone has free will. It is for free! You don't have to pay for it, you just have to use it. The more you use of your positive willpower, the more you have to use. It is accumulative. It stores up in your third chakra, right at your belly button. That is where it stores up and it is carried with you into future lives. Therefore, the more effort that you put out, the more use of your will, the more will is stored within you. That is kind-of like a boon and that willpower is carried from life to life. That is why some people are strong and other people are weak, depending upon the amount of will that they use.

Therefore, within Saivite Hinduism, comes sadhana, daily sadhana, daily religious practice at the same time every day. Never failing except, of course, on Saturdays and Sundays. But all during the week, keep up that sadhana at the same time every day, preferably before sunrise. But, if you can't do this, choose another time and keep the same time. You will have to use willpower to do this. You will have many excuses in your intellect. You will have many excuses in your instinctive mind but your willpower has to dominate the intellect and dominate the instinctive mind to bring forth the force of the soul.

You are a beautiful soul. Each one in cyberspace is a beautiful soul of radiant light, living in an astral body, living in a physical body, having developed around it an intellectual body. But, the soul is superconscious. It knows all, at every point in time. It is tuned into the akasha, where all memory patterns are, that have ever happened. Where all memory patterns are, the soul, the superconsciousness, can read them. Give your soul a chance and be like this group that we were with yesterday, that came to visit us, Global Spiritual Leadership.

We intend to have more meetings on Kauai. If you are a global spiritual leader, I am sure you will be invited to the Global Spiritual Leadership gatherings here on the beautiful Garden Island of Kauai, to be renewed, to be invigorated, and to do a lot of sharing with other global, spiritual leaders. Pick up a lot of new ideas, a lot of new inspirations, and share what you have been doing, and what you are going to do. It is a sharing group.

We will be back again with you tomorrow. Happy you tuned in, and sorry about yesterday. But we made it up today, I think, a little bit longer.